Two Skies
by Flours
Summary: Tucked away in a crevice of Snow Country, the small village of Ieyasu withers. But don't all economic scales tip once war breaks out, and aren't all children in this world forced to choose to eat or die. AU Third Shinobi War. Semi SI/OC
1. Okura

I'm back on my bullshit

**Disclaimer: **Naruto is not mine.

* * *

Her village is desperately poor.

She guesses it takes her somewhere between three to four months to acquire a crude map of the local terrain to even pinpoint her location… but there she goes, getting ahead of herself. That comes later when she can read _properly_.

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"You can't smoke those!"

She startles at the sheer vehemence and the cigarette wobbles in her grip and she scowls, hunching closer to her core to gather warmth. She hears his precious new boots crunch in the snow just beside her and she spits halfheartedly, "S-Shove off…" She's embarrassed that it's more of a mumble that escapes her but doesn't struggle for another inhale before the cigarette is unceremoniously wrenched from her mouth by a frowning Arata.

She groans at his stony silence, "You're such a mother hen…"

She'll just get another pack at the docks,_ freaking_ helicopter teammate-

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…

She adjusts the nondescript katana strapped tightly to her back blankly, wary of making another mistake in this war with loose gear and running in the horrible hot and sticky marshes of Kusagakure. She can't even remember which battle it was exactly that her first precious katana sunk into the chakra-enhanced muck never to be seen again-

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"Shaping ice is a strenuous chakra control exercise," Jutaro-Sensei explains with a savage grin, "and that's precisely why we're going to start with that one!"

His arms _are not_ directed at that hulking iceberg, supporting that _other_ colossal ice wall? Her palms already feel numb as her mind conjures the hellish afternoon they're about to spend covered in ice shavings.

_Certainly not…_

She is on Toyohisa's left, but somehow she knows without looking that she mirrors her teammates' horrified expressions-

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She is handed her mask when she's eleven by her squad, and she blinks at the sheer ferocity of it.

"Do you...?"

The masks are Tradition in Ieyasu. They're given to those who fight and bleed for the small aggregation of families, who learn the chakra arts or what the Five Nations call Shinobi Arts. They're not quite big enough for that, she vaguely recalls when she dances feather-light fingertips upon the intricately painted porcelain, but she still has a squad and they are good. They're all mercenaries, fight for money and not country and yet they created a family when they had nothing. They are hired knives and swords in war.

Her fingers tremble. She must have forgotten breakfast this morning, is feeling ill, because there is no softness in her.

Arata clearly had his hands on the mask first, as it is all but saturated in red paint. She nearly scoffs. But careful hands had traced the precious, utterly ridiculous white stripe that stretches from the left side to swirl in the center.

How off balance… how cheeky. It must have been Toyohisa.

And it must have been Jutaro-Sensei to add the contour, the humorless depth…

"Do you like it?"

Her heart clenches at the thought of her precious team spending so much time on her presentation to the world.

Her eyes burn when she looks away from her present to her teammate, who fidgets in anticipation.

Her voice _certainly is not_ thick when she taunts, "Who added the menacing eyebrows?!"

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Grass is fickle, she quietly thunders, and tomorrow they can be fighting with Konoha instead of frantically dodging its warriors' carnage. Her heart trembles as she steadily knocks her katana, flawlessly shredding flesh with agile fingers and quick feet and her teenaged knobby knees. She regrets that mercy is cruel in the field, that maiming her enemies would only lead them to suffer with poisoned blood and aching-

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Her team weapon inspection their sixth week in Kusagakure ends in bloody knuckles and bruised pride, but there is trembling hope among the preteens and a strong yet so feeble smile from their Sensei when Toyohisa sharpens his tantō perfectly with _just_ a rock and _whoop_ of victory. She grimaces and struggles with her katana and Arata remains silent with his batch of kunai, though they understand it is from concentration and not indignance. Arata is a focused boy… they are eleven now, she muses.

No matter.

They understand their mistakes, their blunted blades and shorted wire, and will not fail each other again.

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Arata is more adept at chakra control and ice release than she is and he always has been.

Their feet magically glide on water and he trips her just as she brings her _nagamaki_ in for a debilitating strike, and she plunges under, stunned. How can she lose focus like that in a spar when _she's been in the dregs of gore… a war for more than five years…!_

She recovers viciously with a palm slapping the surface, but what she doesn't expect is Arata's hands to _move_ and suddenly she is _soaring_ into the air upon a tower of ice. She is at least 50 meters high and she is dizzy. She is so thrown, blinking at the audacity and sheer speed of his ninjutsu, that she can only swallow her hot indignation and huff a quiet, strained laugh.

She doesn't see burgundy Iwagakure splattered with kunai and dripping ninja wire and forest green flak-jackets burnt into the dirt of Earth Country in front of her, only a patch of black hair and the Kitsune mask that she designed for squad-mate.

She proceeds to scoot off the edge of his high tower, but Arata is quick and his fingers are nimble in forming water into ice with chakra so that he creates a crude slide for her to swiftly luge down into the polar depths once again. She shrieks a shrill laugh with her arms above her head, and the louder her scream the further the images fade.

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Now she's way ahead of herself.

_It must be all the blood drenching the side of her face and the black spots dancing across her vision like a bad film. She feels her mouth form a clumsy smile when she thinks of the last terrible picture she has seen, baring bloody teeth. She tries to laugh, wants to laugh, but what tumbles from her lips sounds strangled, wrecked-_

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Her name is Okura, and everything and nothing is how she remembers.

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	2. Not Quite Right

**Disclaimer: **Naruto is not mine

Trigger warning for uhh general gore… cannibalism.

* * *

Everything blurry looks the same and she is nauseous, so naturally her weak stomach churns for _record breaking_ seconds and she vomits. Muffled noises work their way towards her, elegant fingers jostle her and she is _freezing_.

She is cold and not solely to complain. The thin fleece blanket she is swaddled within does little to keep the frigid air at bay, and Okura feels her facial muscles pull. Her limbs hurt. Even her fingers ache at the joints, almost like she's spent years cracking her knuckles and she's now paying for the abuse.

She needs to adjust to the cold. She is displaced, she knows it. She does not remember but one alarming fact, and it is that she doesn't like cold weather because for some reason her numb fingers, toes and runny nose make her grumpy. Go _fucking _figure.

She screams and her ears are splitting at the shrill wail. She swears it.

This goes on for five weeks and she is consequently abandoned, she learns later. Apparently colicky babies are not tolerated in Ieyasu, Snow Country.

_(Heartless cads)_

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She has another vivid memory when she is six months old. She has a visceral pain and longing to be in her own loft that is showered with pastels and plants… along with her cat, Remi, who has soft gray fur and headbutts her hand for attention. She aches not to have him with her. He was her sole companion after long days of work, though she does not know what those days consisted of. Her next thought- immediately- is that she is _buzzing_ with something foreign, and it is not natural, and she is severely uncomfortable and has been ever since she could make sense of her tiny, wiggling toes. These are her thoughts and feelings in her new home, somewhere significantly… _more _than her previous accommodations of torn fleece and fur in the hollowed-out snow.

She's surprised she's made it this long.

It's a hollow thought accompanied by a horrifying _squelch _to Okura's left, and she's so startled she begins to cry. Loudly. Her wide eyes are better now at six months, even though she's soft and fleshy and best characterized as a lump, and although she spent an undetermined amount of time in the snow, she knows she can see clearly if she just tries.

It turns out when she tries to identify her surroundings, the man who cradles her in the crook of one hulking arm smells like a tangy copper penny, and he wields a ridiculous cleaver in the other. The crude thing is tainted with bright crimson, and the smell is horrendous, pungent as it is strongly swung into an unknown substance for another _thunk_.

If possible, she wails louder.

_…_

_…_

_…_

Okura supposes she is adopted by a butcher at around six months old. She doesn't know if adopted is quite the word she'd use, for her definition of adopting vaguely summons a haze of paperwork and horrendous amounts of money and home visits she is sure the butcher would fail, but she is cared for at the very least. He tries to feed her meat from his cuts, but Okura knows she is a baby _(tinyneckfeethands)_ and _refuses_ solids to the point of projectile vomiting on the butcher's favored carving utensils in protest. She believes her point is made after that frankly demoralizing incident, because he returns hours later with a milky substance from a questionable source.

_(She won't refuse it. In the haze of her mind that isn't really hers, she thinks she really likes food.)_

So she eats and she spends her days quietly watching the butcher from the crook of his arm or the other multitude of odd places he seems to stash her, trying her best to wriggle her immature muscles to generate heat. It is an icebox in here, _honestly_. He doesn't quite seem to know what to do with her, like when he balances her on the shelf above his counter and simply _expects_ her jelly body to remain upright like a _bloody Maneki-neko. _Or when her tiny, stubby feet that caregivers normally love to smell or tickle are inches away from his unsanitary cleaver because she is _resting on his meat counter like a slab of his cuts_… well, Okura rationalizes that the man is a bit unwell when he licks his knives clean _and then_ rinses them beneath the faucet.

His arms are warm, though. And though she can't really call it a smile that morphs his face from glacial to acceptable when she dutifully performs her muscle flexion and extension, successfully crawling just a month after she's placed in his care, he does provide shelter and she hasn't lost a limb yet.

She supposes these are his redeeming qualities.

_…_

_…_

_…_

Time is measured in weather patterns for Okura. She blinks her still-blurry baby eyes at the shop's glass windows and watches snow flurries fall beneath the grey sky, watches the days slowly morph so the powdery, puffy substances piles in the pitiful streets that she doesn't remember. Okura stretches her face and smiles frequently at the weather even as she curses it, training her face because she knows it is what she's supposed to do. Her body knows it as the snow thickens into hardened ice, yet the shop is still accessible due to the butcher's talent for shoveling. She thinks it's from his constant wielding of heavy objects and cutting through impossible meat, but her _buzzing_ body gives her pause as she walks for the first time on the brittle floors.

_(She… misses something)_

_She is missing something. _

The butcher catches her milestone movements with an unreadable expression as he enters the shop and brushes ice from his shoulder, allowing the door to slam behind him. He nods once firmly with a decisive thought. The little ball of flab could be something after all, so he wordlessly shows her a series of movements for her to practice with her shaky arms and awkward legs. She falls on the floor more than she can count, flat on her bum and elbows and stomach, and a haze in her head tells her (_familarfamilarfamiliar)_ but Okura persists. Her body can move if she wills it, and apparently she had the will to survive the snow and elements for an undetermined amount of time. Her caregiver eyes her over the counter critically so often and grunts disapproval, and if there is silence Okura lets a private smile bloom across her tiny face until she slips again.

Silence means she is correct.

_…_

_…_

_…_

She sees familiar looking grey snow and thinks time has passed to tug on her caregiver's pant-leg and tries to make a word. She is angry that her attempts before have been dismal, but the butcher simply doesn't speak. She works her cheeks and puffs, whining low in her throat and she ignores the wetness in the corner of her eyes because she is _above_ those bouts of crying now! It is hard to do anything but babble _(bamapababaSIMPLYridiculous)_ but she manages a bastardized version of what she wants, and it is her first and only request of the butcher.

"B-baook…" The subsequent frown that cracks her face could be considered a grumpy scowl promising a tantrum on the horizon if her demands aren't met, she is entering her Terrible Twos, but Okura is much more frustrated with her abominable pronunciation.

_(For fuck's sake.)_

The request from an eighteen-month-old is surprisingly humored, and just as Okura watches the butcher maintain his meat cuts routine with morbid curiosity, the butcher silently watches Okura whisperingly teach herself how to read over the course of the next few months.

Then, she begins to write, and the butcher pays a bit more attention to the two-and-a-half-year-old child living in his domain. Her pudgy hands awkwardly hold one of two calligraphy brushes he owns, and her writing is choppy, messy and her black eyebrows pinch in what he knows is focused frustration- something he has only seen in patient adults _practicing a learned skill_.

He is rearing a prodigy.

_(She is an anomaly. She is missing something.)_

Once he fully appraises her, Okura learns how to hold a cleaver. Then it is a beige saw, jagged and raw and the smell of his stained counter is so stale, and she spots a detail she's missed previously and that is a knuckle, clearly that of a human pinky and she knows- she feels her throat closing and burning with each swallow-

"Do not."

She startles at the thundering timber of the butcher's command, so scared that she hiccups her vomit and she has to hold it in her mouth and swallow it down. She is horrified, disgusted- enraged that this is the first that he has deemed to speak to her, his charge, in the snow-covered years she has born his presence.

She holds her molten tears in the back of her throat with her disgust and lets the _buzzing_ in her limbs distract her from her upset, unable to understand the pull from her navel and how it travels to her toes and fingertips and disperses coolly at the crown of her head. It's a cold rage, and she clings to the comfort.

_…_

_…_

_…_

The butcher has her cut meat _(peoplegirlsboyschildren)_ with an array of tools and strikes her knuckles when he sees her muffle her mouth. It is enough to bruise her almost illuminous complexion, but he never breaks skin. She thinks he'd be the one to lick her wounds if he did. She cringes internally at that line of thought, rubbing her small wrists self-consciously.

Between reading the strange books her guardian has continued to supply her, the new stances and stretches the butcher deems to show Okura weekly, and… learning the tools of the butcher, Okura is graced with another hardened, packed snow and knows she turns four years old. She's made great leaps in her reading comprehension and tool dexterity, because these things seem less foggy and newer so naturally, she felt inclined to try a bit harder. She is proud of how she can throw a knife into one of the shop's wooden posts and hear the satisfying _thunk_ of accuracy.

She feels relief at the butcher's inattention to her knife sharpening, her fluid stretching and cat-like quiet. If this is the trade the butcher wishes for her to apprentice, she will accept this life. She's still unsure about many things, and doesn't quite know if her head is right, but the butcher is cannibalistic so she thinks maybe a lot of people aren't all quite right here.

She receives confirmation of this fact before the weather turns.

It is not painless.

Okura plaits her thick hair neatly behind the counter, comfortably situated in her favored cubby that is really a holding for spare tools, but if the butcher didn't want her to find the space then maybe he shouldn't have stashed her here as a baby. (She knows far too many of his hiding spaces).

She is hidden from view when the voices _(loud, she thinks. Bar voices and karaoke machines and pool tables…)_ abruptly come into the shop, and she feels the butcher stop his work rather than sees it. She feels it in the way his hands no longer make the noise of steel against steel, and oh how she takes comfort in the reassuring _knocks_ and _clangs_ of his tools against the smelly counter. She has never realized that she is observant of sounds, and she takes for granted the auditory ease of the butcher's silence. These men's voices are harsh, cutting and she does not like the tone or the acid that escapes their mouths-

"Shinobi trash…!"

"…how can you _eat_-?!"

Okura's hands are claws in her long, black hair when there is a familiar _squelch _and it causes her to tighten her grip, because there is _gurgling_ and she sees legs stumbling _(Rubberband Man on the jukebox)_ and suddenly nothing at all because she squeezes her eyes tightly.

_She isn'thereisn'thereisn'there. _

Pastels bloom behind her eyelids and a square skylight lazily welcomes the sunlight and plants line her windows. There are three aloe-vera plants side by side and two baby-toes cutely nearby, an asparagus fern situated on a rustic shelf up high and a large spider plant in the corner-

The butcher's disembodied head gazes vacantly into Okura's own eyes.

She stares at his exposed vertebra _(cervical)_ of his neck and thinks that the meat looks nothing like hamburger. What's hanging is fleshy and stringy_ (ligaments attach bone to bone, you moron. Tendons are muscle to bone. We know this)_ and the butcher would toss the meat in favor of something for more substance. A flank, perhaps.

She opens her mouth wordlessly, but reconsiders as the noise in the meat shop doesn't fade.

_(Not quite right)_

She watches the blood pool from the base of the butcher's neck, some from his nose and tucks into herself when the shuffling nears her cubby. She does not know how long she stares at the red puddle and her guardian's head, but her little legs cramp.

"Burn it down. This fucking smell… that monster is finally dead."

_…_

_…_

_…_

Okura is four and watches the flames eat her home from across the pathetic excuse for a street. _(Nothing can touch home. Home is fresh oxygen and splashes of color and warmth. None of that is here)_. She is filthy with soot, pale face dusted black and red and the only clothes she owns on her back smelling of something rancid and smoke. She knows how to move around unnoticed and wield strange tools, read and write in a very impoverished area, and knows she is not quite right.

Okura is four when she hears the word Shinobi for the first time and her world view tilts a sharp ninety-degrees.

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**Thanks for reading! **


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